


Do You See What I See?

by inkasrain



Category: Boardwalk Empire, Downton Abbey
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 18:21:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkasrain/pseuds/inkasrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hell passes daily before Sybil Crawley's eyes while she serves in a field hospital in France. She believes that she is becoming accustomed to the horrors of war, stoic to the unabated suffering.</p><p>Until she meets Richard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do You See What I See?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [voodoochild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/gifts).



> Dear voodoochild,
> 
> Merry Christmas! I hope you enjoy this story and have an excellent new year!
> 
> This is marginally AU. The major change is that Sybil spends 1920 (and when I said "1920", I meant "1917" because numbers hate me!) serving as a nurse in France instead of puttering around Downton Abbey. I'm not sure where Richard served according to Boardwalk Empire canon, so for the sake of the story, it's France! :-)
> 
> Best wishes!  
> Your Yuletide Author

_November, 1917_

 _Aisne, France_

  
The man is American, Dr. Malview tells her, and very likely to die before morning.   


"The poor bastard's lost half his face, and more blood than we can give him," the doctor says, and through the veil of her own exhaustion Sybil can almost see the shadows under his eyes darkening like bruises. "There's morphine if he wakes, but I doubt he will." She does not ask how the man came to be found so far from the American lines; it is another link in the long chain of meaningless mystery stretching back to the day the war began. 

There have been no answers since that day, and Sybil has no more will for questions.

A hoarse cry, muffled but not muted by the labyrinth of wet canvas which houses the field hospital reaches the bed where she and the doctor stand over the dying man, followed by a nurse calling out in French for one of the doctors. Dr. Malview turns with what is nearly a stagger and moves down the ward toward the small commotion; Sybil starts to follow him, but he waves her back.

"Stay here, Nurse Crawley. You'll be called if you're needed."

"Yes, Doctor." The words scrape over her dry throat; she can't remember the last time she's had even water to drink, much less tea, or anything really reviving. Not since she's last slept, and she's lost count of how many hours have passed since that has been. The crises are constant, but the supply of nurses is painfully thin. 

Sybil starts to step down the ward to fetch fresh dressing for Colonel Anderson when the fog parts for a moment and she recalls that she does not know the name of her newest charge, which she feels she ought to even if he'll most likely have died by morning.

 _Especially so,_  she thinks, and moves back to the man's bed.

Gently as she can, Sybil navigates through the layers of puss-soaked gauze and graying linen in search of his dog tag. For a terrible moment, she is afraid the metal tag has melted into his skin, but the lightest of tuggings reveals that it has only been stuck to his chest under layers of dried blood-- and Sybil has not been bothered by blood for what seems like a lifetime. She removes the identification as gently as she can, though the man does not stir at all, and rubs the gore away onto her uniform until the name impressed on the steel is legible.

CPL. RICHARD HARROW

\--

Some hours later, after the Frenchman further down the tent has died and she has finished washing up six of the more conscious soldiers by herself, Sybil returns to Corporal Harrow. He has not moved or made a sound since she last measured his pulse-- which has held remarkably steady through the night-- but she can see movement beneath his right eyelid. She wonders for a moment whether she ought to call Doctor Malview, or whichever physician might have taken charge of her ward while she was changing soiled sheets, but decides to wait.

The field hospital is quiet, or as quiet as it ever is. The sighs and delirious murmurings of the wounded and around her make little impression against the rising tower of Sybil’s numb exhaustion, the deafening beat of her own pulse pounding in her ears. Two or three other nurses bend over other beds, but they are indistinct figures against the darkness that the feeble yellow lamps cannot push back.

A dreadfully uncomfortable camp chair is propped open against the American soldier's bed, and suddenly Sybil finds herself seated, her feet tingling in relief. 

  
_I’ll only sit while I take his pulse. It will only be a moment._   


  
_Just a moment..._   


\--

  
When she wakes, Sybil is cold, and she thinks that it really was a mistake to have begged Mama to allow her to sleep out on the grounds in a tent. The damp chill tingles in her bones, and with the gradual decisiveness of half-dreaming, she decides to go back to the house and finish the night in her own bed, no matter how Mary and Edith will tease her in the morning.

Then the smell of the field hospital assaults her senses, stronger after the reprieve of sleep-- earth and blood, rain and vomit, and smoke... 

Sybil bolts upright, biting her lips against the gasp of pain that tries to escape as her neck makes a powerful argument against falling asleep in a camp chair. She raises her hands to try and soothe the strain, and it is only then that she realizes that the man in the bed beside her is holding her left hand.

His grip is not strong, but it is decisive-- this is no reflexive spasm. Sybil sits frozen, all of her concentration focused in an instant on the long, tapered fingers clasped around her own.

“Corporal Harrow,” she whispers, and the man’s right eyelid flutters against an impossible weight of pain and darkness. “You’re in a field hospital in Aisne. You’ve been... you’ve been wounded.”    
  
There is no response; Sybil’s heartbeat pulses in her ears, counting away the precious seconds.

“Corporal Harrow, if you understand me, squeeze my hand again.” She takes a breath. “Please.”

It comes very slowly at first, hesitant, as if the man is deciding whether he wants to commit to the hellish reality he has woken to face. But before another minute passes, the skin of Harrow’s knuckles stretches white against his effort to respond to Sybil’s question.

“Good,” she breathes, “That’s very good, Corporal.” Sybil grips his hand with as much strength as she dares and wipes her other hand against her eyes, brushing away the first tears she has allowed herself in seven months.

\--

  
It is a bit more than a month before Corporal Harrow is well enough to be moved from the field hospital and returned to the American base in Rouen. He has been conscious for much of that time, though the doctors do not attempt much rehabilitation past encouraging him to sit up in his bed instead of lying prone. Doctor Williams has diagnosed shell shock, but Sybil privately disagrees; there is too much intensity in Corporal Harrow’s gaze, too much understanding in his silent response to her care. His good eye focuses on the canvas slope of the tent above him as though it bears words that only he can read. Harrow is not hiding in some merciful mental oblivion; he is always in the present in that purgatorial tent, even if he has not yet decided to engage with it.

And of course, there is his face to think of. The injury is not the worst Sybil has seen during her time in France, but it is one of the most gruesome. Sybil thinks of it often, the red, unnaturally textured rawness of the flesh, the unforgiving blackness where the corporal's eye should be. He is lucky, in the perverse vein of fortune that this war has let flow; only a very little rot set in, and Doctor Malview had to pare away just the smallest snags of skin around the jaw and ear. The nerves in the left side of Harrow's face have all been dead for ages, so they hadn't even needed to waste any morphine during the brief surgery.

That is how Doctor Malview puts it, anyway.

"I'm terribly sorry, chap," the doctor says later, in the loud, bright voice of a man fundamentally uncertain of his audience, "But your left eye has been done for, I'm afraid." He pauses then, waiting for a reaction, perhaps; Harrow only blinks his good eye, very slowly. "Well," Doctor Malview says, followed by a long beat of silence. "Er. Carry on then, Nurse Crawley."   
  
No one has told Harrow anything else--anything important--about the state of his face, including Sybil. She prays for the strength to tell him herself, but finds barely enough courage to peel herself out of her cot at whichever hour of the night or day she is called back to her bloody, endless work.

\--

  
The morning of Corporal Harrow's transfer to the American base is madness. Apparently there has been an ugly skirmish with the Germans by the river, and British soldiers suffering from various degrees of gas poisoning trickle in like a bloody drizzle from the ever-present sky of the warfront. It is nearly noon and Sybil has been on her feet since midnight, tending to the blinded, hacking, heaving men. She has retched herself a time or two; the residual smell of the awful gas is one thing she has not been able to grow accustomed to.

And so it not until half past one that Sybil finds Corporal Harrow, forgotten, propped on a threadbare stretcher up against the canvas by one of the field hospital's cave-like entrances. His gaze, as always, scours the far wall with unnerving intensity. Sybil's heart falls like a stone and she sinks to the ground with it, the chilly earth soaking through her uniform as she sits.

"Oh, Corporal Harrow," she whispers, not knowing if he is paying her any attention but needing to speak none the less. "I'm so terribly sorry. We've been... we’ve been rather run over this morning. I'll fetch one of the doctors, I'm sure they'll know when you're to be collected."

She begins to fight her way to her knees, weighted down beneath the constant yoke of exhaustion, when Sybil feels Corporal Harrow's hand clasp gently around her wrist. 

He has turned his head, the first time Sybil has seen him do so in his entire time under her care, his chin tilted toward her at a stiff angle. Harrow's right eye focuses on her, and she notices, also for the first time, that his remaining iris is a deep, mournful green.

Sybil’s fingertips have gone numb with shock.

Corporal Harrow blinks several times, his grip on her wrist tensing and relaxing in tandem. The right side of his mouth has started to move, working slightly at first, and then further. A faint hissing comes from the gap between his lips, softly. His left hand moves stiffly to brush at the maze of bandages still plastering his face-- though less for healing by now than for the doctors simply not knowing what else to do. Long moments pass, the gentle hissing repeated over and over, until understanding washes over Sybil like a bittersweet wave.

_Show me._  


“Oh,” she whispers, and then her sight goes hot and blurry. She wants to agree as much as she wants to refuse, wants to speak as much as she wants to be back at Downton silently listening to the silence of the sleeping house. Sybil starts to tilt her head against the pitiful request but Harrow leans forward, just a fraction, and catches her eyes as firmly as though he held her head in his hands. 

There is fear in his gaze, but determination as well, and a desperate yawning need to finally reach out and understand his new reality. Sybil recognizes these things, because she felt them herself when she had decided that her skills were too badly needed in France for her to sleep well safe and mostly useless at Downton.

“Sometimes, we must all look the Devil in the eye,” Granny had murmured to her after the long battle to be allowed to battle in France. “And spit in it too, Sybil dear. Now you be safe, and _don’t_ tell your father I’ve said that.”

\--

  
There is a small mirror in the nurse's wing, dusty and coated with the grime of war. Sybil has never once looked into it, and she does not remember seing any of her fellow nurses primping before the glass either. She slips back into her wing and seizes the mirror from it's dark corner, trying to appear nondescript as she returns to Corporal Harrow in his own forgotten nook.

Harrow's eye follows her hands as well as he can while Sybil removes the layers of bandaging; when the work brings her hands outside his range of vision, she can feel his familiar gaze tracing the lines of her face. 

The strata of scabbing covering the left side of Harrow's face have begun to thicken into a ghastly crust, leaving darker valleys and crevices where the damage was done more deeply. Sybil purses her lips, the horror of the corporal's wound striking her with fresh intensity, though this time her concern is for the man in front of her and not herself.

Finally, the last of the bandaging peels away into her lap. Watching Corporal's good eye carefully, Sybil licks her lips and raises the mirror.   
  
Corporal Harrow blinks; his mouth tightens. Sybil can see the minuscule corresponding spasm in the left side of his face. 

He raises his gaze to the ceiling of the tent, and she quickly lowers the mirror and begins to grab at the bandages, but Harrow lifts the glass up himself with his right hand, forcing his view back into the foreign reflection.

Rain patters softly overhead, muffled against the canvas. The nurse and the soldier sit together in silence for several minutes; every so often, she give a gentle squeeze to his left hand.

\--

  
The Americans do not arrive until the last of the dusk is draining away into night. Corporal Harrow stares at his lap while Sybil reapplies his bandages. She changes Doctor Malview's careful pattern every so slightly, leaving just a bit more of Harrow's mouth exposed to the air.

"In case there is anything you need to say, Corporal," she tells him quietly as she finishes. She grasps his hands-- both of them, now-- and squeezes one last time.

Sybil watches from the dark mouth of the tent as Corporal Harrow is loaded onto the American ambulance. It is raining heavily now, and the only light comes from the dim lamps mounted on the truck.

Which is why Sybil is never quite certain if Richard Harrow really does raise his arm to her, ever so slightly, in a salute of farewell just before he disappears from her view.

She is never certain.

But she thinks she knows.


End file.
